Description The Silver Baron’s Wife traces the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor (Lizzie). This fascinating heroine worked in the silver mines and had two scandalous marriages, one to a philandering opium addict and one to a Senator and silver baron worth $24 million in the late 19th century.   A divorcée shunned by Denver society, Lizzie raised two daughters in a villa where 100 peacocks roamed the lawns, entertained Sarah Bernhardt when the actress performed at Tabor’s Opera House, and after her second husband’s death, moved to a one-room shack at the Matchless Mine in Leadville. She lived the last 35 years of her life there, writing down thousands of her dreams and noting visitations of spirits on her calendar.   Hers is the tale of a fiercely independent woman who bucked all social expectations by working where 19thcentury women didn’t work, becoming the key figure in one of the West’s most scandalous love triangles, and, after a devastating stock market crash destroyed Tabor’s vast fortune, living in eccentric isolation at the Matchless Mine. An earlier version of this novel won the PEN/New England Discovery Award in Fiction. Author Information DONNA BAIER STEIN is the author of Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 IndieBook Awards Finalist) and Sometimes You Sense the Difference (Finishing Line Press Poetry Chapbook). Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, New York Quarterly, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. She was a founding Poetry Editor at Bellevue Literary Review and now publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received prizes from the Allen Ginsberg Awards, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a PEN/New England Discovery Award, a Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars Fellowship, a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Arts, three Pushcart nominations and more. www.donnabaierstein.com. Praise At long last we get to hear Baby Doe’s compelling side of the hurtful tale that made her the most hated woman in the West. Donna Baier Stein has captured young Lizzie’s Doe’s agency in her first marriage, as well as older Lizzie’s Tabor’s deep spiritual resilience during her decades of isolation. Through Stein’s artistry, Baby Doe’s story makes the heart ache. Read more…

Description The place is Washington, D.C., and the year,1984. The ruthless dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell has not come to pass. Or has it? Under the presidency of a former Hollywood actor, the struggle for America’s soul has begun-a trial of conscience and idealism versus idolatry and political dictatorship. The White House and its minions intend to shield the government from real public scrutiny, and with hundreds of billions at stake, any means necessary will be used to protect the corporate mobsters who now pull strings and triggers in every agency from the “Star Wars” Pentagon down to the to the trash collecting GSA. But it won’t be easy. A resistance movement composed of rebellious government workers has formed, and they call themselves, The American Watch. Their leader, Laney Dracos, is a powerful government insider with strong ties to Capitol Hill. Like her partisan companions in the Watch, she rejects cooperation with the regime and plans for Its demise with the help of the fourth estate. However, when a naive new co-worker, Edison Eden, becomes an overly enthusiastic sidekick in her war on corporate Washington, she is inevitably forced to choose between her honor or her life. Author Information Michael B. Neff worked in Washington, D.C. during the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, leaving shortly after George W. became president. He has lobbied the Senate for greater whistleblower protections and in 2002 joined with the ACLU to successfully defeat Internet censorship laws in Michigan and Arizona. As a government worker, he held jobs in managerial and budget-analyst job series from NASA to GSA. Always an avid writer, his work has appeared in such literary journals as North American Review, Quarterly West, The Literary Review, and Conjunctions. He now directs the Algonkian Conferences, helping new writers get published. Praise All The Dark We Will Not See accurately portrays an important period in American political history wherein the struggle for democracy took a wrong turn … —Thomas Devine, Chief Counsel, Government Accountability Project All The Dark We Will Not See is a compelling, utterly original novel that savagely and hilariously explores what went wrong in this country a couple of decades ago, and that keeps going wrong even now. Neff is a raucous new voice in American literature. Read more…

Description In this stirring new collection, Ronna Wineberg explores our essential bonds to partners, children, parents, and friends. Intimacy, marriage, parenthood, adultery, divorce, and the legacies left by the past unfold in these beautifully written stories. Men and women search for happiness and love, yet face longing, disappointment, and loss. The characters in Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life struggle with unexpected changes in their own lives but discover the power of kindness, the joy of connection, and the ways in which we can be renewed. Author Information Ronna Wineberg is the author of On Bittersweet Place, her first novel, and a debut collection, Second Language, which won the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project Literary Competition, and was the runner-up for the 2006 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her stories have appeared in American Way, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review and elsewhere, and been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is the recipient of a scholarship in fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and residencies to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. She has been awarded a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the founding fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and lives in New York. www.ronnawineberg.com Praise Nine Facts That Can Change your Life is a richly imagined, deeply felt and unusually fully realized collection. In story after story Ronna Wineberg shows her characters making surprising swerves and connections, reaching from the past into the present. I marvel at how much she can accomplish in a relatively small number of pages, and at how these stories stay with me. Wineberg is a writer of lovely generosity. – Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy Ronna Wineberg has written lovely stories, threaded through with the themes of American Jewishness: self hate, self-love, apartness, the urgent need to belong. As well as a wisdom and compassion that come only from deep experience–of writing and of life.” – John Benditt, author of The Boatmaker, winner of the Goldberg Prize, the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction As Ronna Wineberg notes in Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life, “The human eye is always more than enough.” Her own perceptive eye lands on people in the Midwest, Manhattan, Poland, and German, as they maneuver their way through love and loss. Read more…

Description In Ancestors, Hawkins, a man adrift, finds himself in a Native American homeland called Chaco Canyon, a place of relics haunted by history. He is besieged by voices revealing memories of other lives, including those of his immediate family, truths he had never known: “Like something out of a dream. He could see it, those stone dwellings high on the cliff, speaking of those who had been there who knows when. And who were they? Ancestors, the voice said . . .” Hawkins learns the painful histories of the generations of his origins, who he is, and the quest he must fulfill in spite of the obstacles in his path and temptation to give in and run from the challenges facing him. Ancestors completes Gladys Swan’s Southwestern trilogy, following Ghost Dance and A Dark Gamble, novels also available from Serving House Books. Author Information Gladys Swan has published three novels, Carnival for the Gods, (Vintage Contemporaries Series), Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, (LSU Press, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and A Dark Gamble, as well as seven collections of short fiction. Her poetry and essays, and short stories have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Much of her work is set in New Mexico, where she grew up. Though she has spent most of her career as a writer, she has devoted much of her time during the last two decades to painting and exploring the creative process. Read more…

It’s a winter of snow of mythic proportions. Caught in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, Philip Fellows is meanwhile happy to be immured inside with his lover—free to dodge undesirable work—as he seeks continual sensual pleasure. All the while he is being tracked by a mysterious man in black, who eventually informs him he’s in despair. If Philip isn’t ready for Kierkegaard’s second stage, the ethical, he nonetheless becomes captivated by the beauty of a woman who is given to ramping up an ultra-rational, principled approach to the sexual. Read more…

With his customary pyrotechnics, Herriges gives us a “what if” tale written in a swift, agile manner that has become his signature style over the course of seven luminous novels. So you thought Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959, right? Rudolph Kearns, aka Rudy Keen, begs to differ. Keen, a striving rock and roll song writer and musician, narrates an alternate history concerning some of the greatest singers of the 50?s and 60?s. He has the inside scoop on numerous Rock giants: Del Shannon, Sam Cooke, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper and a wealth of other famous singers. Keen manages to write his own hit song, but nothing turns out the way he dreamed it would. Between the lines, Herriges seems to be reminding us to be careful what we wish for and be careful not to take any agents or record producers (or film producers either) at face value. Read more…

As Chloride, a dying New Mexican mining town, whirls toward a rendezvous with truth, its people find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. A filmmaker trying to turn his disillusionment into truth; a once celebrated film star who disappears; a look-alike who takes her place; a trickster who enjoys the chaos he creates around him are all part of the play. In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modem life. The present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that—tenu¬ously—ensures the world’s continued exis¬tence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel reveals a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions—the voices—of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself. Read more…

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man’s struggle to adhere to the philosophy of yoin ma do, which the narrator quickly translates into his pidgin Japanese-hipster English to mean. ..Go with do flow,”‘ meaning, as the story unfolds, to take life’s ironies as they come. Read more…

A Dark Gamble, a Western epic inspired by the great epic of Gilgamesh, is set in New Mexico during the era when gold and silver were being discovered and prospectors, miners and ranchers were pouring into the territory, the local Apaches consequently being hunted down and displaced. The novel is an attempt to explore an aspect of the American past, with its roots in an untamed land and the uneasy transition to the modern world. The action takes place in the town of Destiny, which shoots up when gold is discovered in the region. The story is told by a narrator who has heard tales of Gil Weston and Jack Cameron since his youth, men who still engage his imagination of those around him. Out of his own fascination and curiosity, he feels compelled to take up their story himself as part of his own quest for an understanding of the past and a meaning for his own life. Read more…

Can the truth really set one free? In Miriam Polli’s debut novel, In a Vertigo of Silence, Emily, the young protagonist, discovers a family secret and thinks, I know now that secrets run in the blood and bones of those who came before. This intensely moving, multi-generational novel follows the lives of women, both strong and frail—shrouded, at times warped, by the confines of a long-held secret. Polli has drawn characters with empathy and poignancy as Emily strives to change the destiny of her family. Read more…